Friday, December 29, 2006

Sept 29, 2007 update - An updated tool (renamed to Blog2Blog)is available see this post for download. Regardless, We will keep this post and the download around for posterities sake. My advice would be to try the current blog2blog tool which has better error handling and updated functionality but the choice is yours.

As unknown surprise to the Blogger staff that picked my blog for the blog of note, I've been working on a tool to import LiveJournal blogs into Blogger. I may as well post this today for all of you incoming viewers. I wish I had something witty and amusing to say in addition, but words fail. I am certain I'll think of something in a couple of days, my mind just works that way -- slow and steady?

Like many good ideas, this one came from my wife who wanted to migrate from LiveJournal to Blogger. I looked around and didn't find a conversion tool after several attempts to Google it. Thus, as a good software developer I spent the time to learn several things and build a tool.

Note, I would say this is a Beta at this point. It works well for the scenarios I've run it through. Please feel free to comment/suggest improvements through the blog comments.

The above is a .zip with a Windows installer. To install unzip and double click on setup.exe.

After installing there is a small manual:"LiveJournal2Blogger Manual.rtf" at C:\Program Files\Cooley Computing Inc\lj2blogger\doc (default location).

To save you the time of opening this file it is below.

LiveJournal2Blogger (lj2blogger)

Introduction

This tool migrates a blog from LiveJournal to Blogger. It uses the public API of LiveJournal and the public API of Blogger to extract data from Livejournal and create equivalent entries in a Blogger account with the appropriate date/time of the orignal entry.

The designed usage pattern is below. For issues please feel free to contact me at pcooley.newsgroups at gmail.com.

Download from LiveJournal1. Enter username (e.g. user1).2. Enter password (e.g. pass1).3. Enter lj-url (the URL of the livejournal you wish to download): http://user1.livejournal.com.4. (optional) if necessary modify the api-url of your journal. This is autopopulated with a typical value.5. Press Fetch from LiveJournal Button.

View Entries (optional)6. Press View Entries Button.7. Use the Entry Number Dialog to change the entry being viewed.8. When complete Press the upper right close window (the X).

Save Entries (optional)1. Press Save Entries2. Choose the filename, it is an XML file with the extension (*.J2B)Note: once saved you can load these Entries without downloading from LiveJournal (use the Load Entries button)

Publish to Blogger

9. Enter username (e.g. user1).10. Enter password (e.g. pass1).11. Enter lj-url (the URL of the livejournal you wish to download): http://user1.blogspot.com.12. (optional) if necessary modify the api-url of your journal. This is autopopulated with a typical value. (if you have a non-upgraded blog take note; for non-upgraded blogs you will need to update the api-url! To find the URL you will have to look at the page source of your journal. See below for more information)13. (optional) select options you please; publish private entries and/or wrap http:// with <a href=”…”>.14. Press Publish to Blogger Button.15. Select the Entries you will to publish (defaults to all entries).

Further instructions (non-upgraded blogs):For non-upgraded blogs you will need to find your feed URI.-- To do this you will have to use your favorite browser and type in the URL of you blog (e.g. http://user1.blogspot.com)-- Using your browser you will need to 'View Source'. This differs slightly between browsers.-- In the source look for link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="User1 (Atom 1.0)"-- The api-url is the http:// location in the href

Additionally it is not possible to post to an old journal with a new 'google' integrated account (for those of you that have only partially upgraded all your journals). Addtionally the publish dates of your livejournal won't be regarded. This is part of the API limitation.

Known issues

• The Application is not multithreaded – The UI refreshes slowly while connected to LiveJournal/Blogger.• Does not import/export comment• found 01/02/2007 - defaults for api-url only work with upgraded blogs.• There are connection problems with the XMLRPC interface to livejournal, but immediately retrying Fetch from Livejournal seems to connect sucessfully. Just try a couple of times. No harm should be done.

It appears today I made the blogs of note on blogger.com Blogs of Note. Incoming hits galore!

Well I tried it, but apparently having 280 posts on LiveJournal was too much for the program as it's throwing back an error that says Server returned a fault exception [206]: Client Error: Client is making repeated requests. Perhaps it's broken?

To start, I suspect this could be a Google/Blogger problem (to start with), I've seen it occasionally fail and then the next day work fine. It might be my implementation of their API, but I do pretty basic stuff.

Can you try again tomorrow (after deleting all your posts - to avoid duplication) and then republish?

Hi, thank you for the community service. However, this is not working with me, since I'm getting these error messages: "invalid method", "client error: client is making a lot of mistakes (...)" and so on... Any guesses on what I might do?Thanks in advance

Especially if this is with the connection and extraction of the journal from livejournal, I would attempt 5 or so times. There definitely seems like there is an API issue (either my code or the XML-RPC interface). However a good portion of the time it succeeds.

However, if that doesn't work please feel free to contact me at pcooley dot newsgroups at gmail.com and I can help.

While expanding the unit tests for livejournal I discovered an issue with 24 hour time verses 12 hour time (AM/PM). (I created a test journal in live journal of 1200 entries within a 12 hour window - :-0). I've released version 1.4.0 to correct for this issue. It is unlikely to be the case that someone posted 100 entries in the same day, but still possible.

Please contact me either at pcooley.newsgroups at gmail.com or respond to the email I sent to your comcast email address and we can see if I can find the issue with your blog and lj2blogger's extraction of it.

It worked, and beautifully i might add. I have not had one problem fetching all 671 entries and publishing them in blogger (it did them all at once in about 10 minutes) and i didn't have to do 50 at a time.

Thank you thank you thank you for being so wonderful and helpful and figuring out everything.

Looking again at the Xanga interface, it would take a little more than some tweaking of the UI. It would require another blog api implementation. This is not currently on my todo list given a few other projects I am working on.

Hello!Do you know of any Blogger to Blogger conversion/import tool?I had several Blogs in Blogger and I would like to merge all of them into a single blog...Thanks in advance for any help:Brunohttp://planeta.terra.com.br/arte/lua/http://bruno-wp.blogspot.com/bruno.wp (at) gmail[dot]com

I get an error when trying to "Fetch from Livejournal":"Connection to LiveJournal Failed. Please try again.Exception: Found an unexpected type while Inserting Journal Entries - expected a string or a byte stream"

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Thanks for dropping by. Actually that message implies that there is some data (encoding) in one of your entries that my little tool doesn't do the right thing with. A number of other people have encountered a similar issue and I have an idea for a better error message, but alas at the moment I am without a Visual Studios 2003 license. I am currently seeking one and hopefully will get one shortly.

In the meantime, there are two options. Wait on me. Or see if you can see an entry midway through your journal that looks suspect and change it (this is a needle in a haystack operation sorry).

so i managed to install the lj2blogger program after a long time. but now i have a different problem.

the first time i tried to fetch from lj it loaded till 101 out of 492 and then stopped.the next 20times i tried didn't even get to 101 but send me an error 406."server returned a fault exeption: 406 client error: client is making repeated requests. perhaps it's broken?"

sometimes it will get to 101 out of 492 but most of the time it doesn't even start fetching.

Several others have run into the same thing (if you look above). I suspect it is a bug in the tool -- not handling a new post type in livejournal; unfortunately I don't have a license for Visual Studios and I am working on that. Then I'll be able to look further.

Interesting, I have been reading through the comments and, I appear to be the only one who has had a problem on the blogger side! LOL The fetch of 200+ entries went by quickly and easily. However, when I click on Publish to Blogger, I get an error message that seems to relate to my log in information which is correct. When I switched over to Google, my log in became my e-mail address and then my password was entered correctly (re-did the whole thing a few times to make sure I had no typos) and I get the following USELESS message:

Hello -- I'm trying to import my LiveJournal (2500+ entries over five years) and I can't seem to be able to import more than 50 entries at a time. Do you know whether there is a setting in Blogger causing that and whether/how I can override it, by any chance? Thanks.

Hi, I was really hoping to use this program, but it stalls every time i try to "fetch" my live journal entires (~1000). It doesn't give me an error, nor do I see any progress on the progress bar. At some point, I can't even refresh the window. It doesn't close, but I can't really access it. Any advice?

J, This doesn't sound like a typical problem. Two questions: (1) have you rebooted your machine and this still happens? (2) do you have a virus scanner that is blocking application access to the internet?

I have restarted the computer, re-installed the program, and still I get the same problem. I also deactivate my anti-virus software (AVG), and the same problem occurs. I have a relatively new Sony laptop, whatever that's worth.

lj2blogger actually is trying to get a count of all the posts to start with. It is likely that it get hung up trying to fetch that much data? It does sound like you have a rather larger journal, is that true?

I've been systematically trying to discover a reason for your problem. Thank-you for your patience.

Thank you so much for this. I wanted to clean out my livejournal and separate my blog and lj into different subjects, this worked like a dream. The only annoying thing is that you can only post 50 entries a day and it stopped at the first fifty, and I have quite a few entries so it will take awhile.

I keep getting an error that the application failed to connect to blogger. I'm trying to move lj entries to blogger. Fetching and loading entries works ok but nothing gets migrated to blogger. I tried with and without entering the long service.post URL in the blogger dest url space.

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About this Blog

In truth this is my personal documentation area where I hope to save myself time by documenting my home projects, work projects. I also hope to be able to provide others with a simple HOWTO guides, FAQs and other tidbits.